Too nuanced to explain in 800 words

Published 4:06 pm, Monday, August 4, 2014

In a column last week, I implied that the Islamic State, which was formerly known as ISIS or ISIL, was besieging the government of Iraq Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki more or less by itself. It was a war between the bad guys and the badder guys, with both sides struggling to capture the "badder" designation.

"ISIS ... is only one of an almost uncountable melange of Sunni militant groups. Besides ISIS, the Sunni insurgency that has risen up against the government of Nouri al-Maliki includes another jihadi group, Ansar al-Islam (Supporters of Islam), as well as the Military Council of the Tribes of Iraq, comprising as many as eighty tribes, and the Army of the Men of the Naqshbandi Order, a group that claims to have Shiite and Kurdish members and certainly includes many Sunni Baathists once loyal to Saddam Hussein."

None of the groups care for one another very much. The Islamic State, for instance, believes that Baathists are infidels and that al Qaeda is too moderate. If and when the coalition defeats al-Maliki - which is in question, since they would have to attack and take over Shiite strongholds like Baghdad - the groups would no doubt fall to bloody quarreling among themselves.

That's what happened in Afghanistan after the Russians were defeated. Warring tribes fought each other, and for months rockets rained down on Kabul.

The future of Iraq looks bleaker and bleaker. Perhaps it will split into three more ethnically harmonious regions. Not that that would end the fighting. Just this weekend, the Islamic State made its first venture into Kurdish Iraq. The Kurds are famously fierce and indomitable fighters. Do we need another war inside a war?

But I brought this up to point out my mistake, and to talk about nuance. There's a great deal of nuance in complicated situations, and that nuance often is ignored by the mainstream media. They like simpler stories of conflict. They like a narrative they can summarize in three paragraphs or two minutes of airtime.

The conflict in Syria became so confusing that the media basically gave up on trying to explain it, even though thousands are still being slaughtered every week. For a while, the administration was supporting the rebels, even suggesting using bombs to help the rebel cause. Then people began looking closely at who the rebels were.

Turns out: It's complicated. Some of the rebels are definitely not friends of the United States. The government of Syria is also not a friend of the United States. We tried to meddle; we tried to give support just to the good rebels. But that didn't work out so well, either.

Meanwhile, the media train had left that station. We'll let them sort it out, we said; tell us when the peace talks start.

The mainstream media - and by that I mean not only traditional media but many websites as well - feast on simple stories. (Also on clickbait quizzes and polls - which Iraq rebel group are you? Take this test. Are you moody, mercurial and prone to anger? You're Ansar al-Islam! Tweet this result; Facebook this quiz.)

And so forth. Meanwhile, in my electronic media, they do "ISIS captures Mosul." And it's a battle story. Lines of troops moving through deserted streets. Roadblocks. Guys raising their rifles and shouting slogans. Could be stock footage.

And yet somewhere there's a complicated story of power and alliances. We know that's true, but we don't know the details. The details are so fluid, so flexible. It's like a novel a week out there, and we're getting a short short story, 800 words on all of everything.

And 800 may be generous.

Naturally, there are media outlets that try to get around that. A lot of them are "highbrow" journals, like the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. They solicit opinions from actual experts, and they have enough time and space to explore the nuances. But all sorts of publications, including mine, write long stories about complicated situations - witness my paper's ongoing investigation of the eastern span of the Bay Bridge and bad behavior by a whole bunch of people.

And there are highbrow websites, blogs written by people who know something. But the value of expertise seems to have been devalued. Political posturing replaces reasoned analysis. And we're all guilty of it. We all write about situations we have only a limited understanding of.

It's the first draft of history, as they say. And sometimes it's a very rough draft indeed. I give you Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, the lie that led us into war, the lie that was accepted by broad swaths of the media.

Doesn't mean we should stop writing - first drafts are better than no draft at all. But there's always more to learn.

In which we come to grips with the limits of media analysis, and plunge ahead anyway.

While she was looking at the place where it had been, it suddenly appeared again. "By-the-bye, what became of jcarroll@sfchronicle.com.

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